Photo Essay: Dick Kemp’s Truck Museum

It’s December 2009, and I’m trying to drive up the Franklin Pierce Highway – otherwise known as one of the windiest, twistiest roads between Vermont and New Hampshire – on my way for an assignment.

My goal – Hillsborough, New Hampshire, where I would see one of the largest private collections of trucks, haulers, bulldozers and the like, all in one outdoor location. Richard Kemp’s Truck Museum, it was unofficially called. The article, “Tears for a Bulldog,” eventually ran in RoadKing Magazine.

Richard Kemp spent five decades buying and collecting trucks. He had worked around the vehicles his whole life, and eventually his collection covered both sides of River Street in Hillsborough. Kids would visit the truck museum, and Kemp would allow the kids to climb into the cabs and beep the horns. Ask him about any one of the trucks on his property, he could give you chapter and verse about how he acquired the trucks, what they were used for, and why they were special to him. He placed no monetary value on the trucks, only the sentimental value of ownership.

And all that changed in December 2007 when Kemp passed away. He had no children and left no heir to assume ownership of the truck museum. The kids that used to play on the trucks now brought their BB guns to shoot out the windows and the headlights. Trucks were parked in the ground for so long, trees and vines actually grew from the ground into the cab.

The city had to do something. Eventually that “something” occurred in July 2009, when the entire property was sold at auction. Truck collectors from across America came to bid on rare and significant pieces of road history, and it seemed that anything with a bulldog head ornament was on its way to new ownership. Two trucks were allowed to remain on the property, which will be regraded into a public park, a park renamed in Kemp’s honor.

The underlying thing, though, is that after I saw what had happened – that a collection turned into a chore – it made me realize, as I drove back home, that I too had collected a ton of items over the years. My record collection filled three rooms of my house. I had videotapes of TV shows I never watched. If nothing else, it was time for me to take some stock of what I owned – that maybe I needed to trim down, to haul away, to send to Goodwill or to the Salvation Army or the church bazaar, or to simply put it in a black Hefty bag and never see it again.

But if nothing else, have a look at some of the images from Dick Kemp’s Truck Museum. The guy did have a decent collection of rolling stock, I must say.